Day 47 – Ugezi Tiger Lodge – Cahora Bassa, Mozambique.

The Dam is between mountains on the East Side

One of the very few inhabited Villages on the side of the dam

Sweet Baby Angel

View from our Room

The Pangolin

Denise and I have the best nights sleep in a long time not sure if it is the beer, air conditioning or sheer exhaustion. We hire a boat to go into the dam and see Hippo, Crocodile and the dam wall. This is an amazing dam the part we see is right at the Eastern end, I do not have the stats, but it is at least 200kms long and at its greatest width it is +/-30kms wide. It has Tiger, Bream, and I saw a photo of a Barbel that was all of 1.7m long and they have caught 11kg tiger in the dam.

We do not see many Hippo and the croc count was zero, the dam wall is quite small and it seems incredulous that it holds back all this water, anyway we had a pleasant 2 hours out in the open and the temperature has risen to the upper 30’s again and for the first time on this trip we looked at some sport on television.

Our skipper tells us that the village headman got a licence to shoot a hippo as the villagers were hungry, it is very clear that game in this part of Mozambique has got no chance and for that matter neither do birds and we saw them waving a long stick that looked like there were flags on it, they were in fact small dead birds.

I then get asked at the lodge if I have ever seen a Pangolin and one of the staff takes me to see a live Pangolin that some local villagers had caught and were trying to sell it if the price had been R1000 I would have probably bought it and let it go, but they wanted R2500, which if you are in the rare creature business is cheap as they are rarely seen let alone caught. It was sad as before it was shown to us it was curled up and tied in a sack, as it lives on termites and some other ants I doubt it will survive long in captivity.

Tomorrow we will make a 06h00am start as we want to get to Chimoio where we will enquire about the route safety further south. We understand that they have an escorted convoy from Save on the Save River to Vilankulos +/- 100kms, but we will make our decision whether to continue down Mozambique or cross over into Zimbabwe. From what we can gather from all those we speak to we will most probably continue with our original plan.

The food at Tiger Lodge is not much to write home about although my whole grilled Bream last night was very nice and tonight I plan to have Peri Peri Chicken – Portuguese style.